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It’s a beautiful cloudless morning as you head out for a bike ride.
Soon you crest the hill and start down the other side.
In minutes you’re feeling great, flying quickly down the road.
The miles tick by.
Eventually, you start to tire again.
But as you grind back into town, just 2 miles from home, something changes.
You feel…better.
But how is this possible?
That model assumes that once you deplete a muscle, it’s done until it can recover.
Most of us think of an athlete’s body like a car.
The end spurt confounds this view.
So does a study of the pacing used by athletes in world-record performances.
But that’s not how history is made.
In 66 world-record-setting performances, the pacing was remarkably consistent.
That’s the end spurt at the very top level of the athletic world.
Say you find yourself at the starting line of a 10K on a cool morning.
The brain controls this pace by varying the amount of muscle it recruits as you run.
So if that’s true, then what is fatigue?
“I am not saying that what takes place physiologically in the muscles is irrelevant.
What I am saying is that what takes place in the muscles is not what causes fatigue.
There are even larger implications when you take these ideas about the brain and fatigue into a competitive setting.
Noakes has a hypothesis about what causes athletes to win and lose.
Remember, he believes that what we feel as fatigue is a mental illusion.
Their deceptive symptoms of fatigue may then be used to justify that decision.
I find this compelling because it resonates strongly with my personal experiences as an athlete.
But there was another dynamic involved in these momentsI wasn’t willing to push through the pain and fatigue.
And you know what?
Once I made those decisions, my sense of fatigue seemed to dissipate.
I felt stronger, even as I knew I wouldn’t emerge as the victor.
“The winner is the athlete for whom defeat is the least acceptable rationalization,” Noakes writes.
I realize that defeat was an acceptable rationalization for me in those moments.
I did just what he said: I consciously accepted my finishing position.
Noakes’s central-governor theory points to the importance of bringing together the physiological and the psychological.
“I think the key is that you have to have self-belief,” he says.
“You have to believe that it’s your destiny to win.”
This is the merger of the two worlds of the body and the brain.
It’s our own minds.
Reprinted by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group.
Copyright 2014 by Mark McClusky.
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